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Hot, Wild and Thoughtful| old_uid | 15431 |
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| title | Hot, Wild and Thoughtful |
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| start_date | 2015/04/01 |
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| schedule | 14h-16h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | RdC, salle 235C |
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| summary | How can perception deliver content which is sufficient for empirical knowledge of an objective environment? There are three reasons why this appears impossible. One is the problem of how perceptual content could be both, at once, receptive and spontaneous, as McDowell discusses towards the beginning of "Mind and World". Another is that we lack an account of how content could be either receptive or spontaneous. We do not understand how perceptual experience can justify observational belief in a distinctive way, different from how one belief may justify another. Standard accounts do not allow perceptual justification to be punctate rather than holistic, nor to provide that cognitive resistance of the world which is necessary for the receptivity of perception. Nor do we understand the possibility of cognitive content which is capable of sustaining a distinction between fiction and reality. A third reason shows how it follows from the nature of animal being that animal perception is not objective. Perception in animals is in the service of the guidance of niche-adapted activity. Since human perception is a form of animal perception, human perception should not be able to deliver world knowledge.
I show how empirical knowledge entails nonconceptual content, meaning construction from the structure within atomic concepts, and punctate justification from hot and wild encounters with the environment. We must re-think the nature of perceptual content as mediational content which is wild (ie it is possible to have a perceptual experience whose content is genuinely a representational content, but is such that, initially, it makes no sense at all to the subject); which is motivationally hot (not neutral in relation to judgment or activity); which does not respect the attitude-content distinction characteristic of the theory of propositional attitudes; which is affective and involves affordances, solicitations and a characteristic subjective valence; and which has a normative structure appropriate to activity guidance. We should rethink semantics as dynamic meaning constructions through which mediational and referential contents are transformed into truth-evaluable contents. Perceptual justification occurs internally to meaning construction, rather than as an inferential process subsequent to the availability of complex conceptual contents. Meaning construction in thought is governed by the epistemic virtue of thoughtfulness, and only indirectly by the norm of truth.
The problem of empirical knowledge is not resolved by epistemology, but by a theory of meaning which allows us to reconceive cognition in terms of an interplay between the mundane normativities (of activity guidance and thoughtfulness), and the elite normativity of truth.
This talk will focus on perceptual justification sufficient for the co-application of spontaneity and receptivity, and its dependence on content which is hot, wild and thoughtful. |
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| responsibles | Proust, Égré |
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